Doctors (BBC 1)

For screenwriters, Doctors often acts as the first rung on the ladder to bigger things. It's always frustrating starting a career in the creative industries and being forced to do things that aren't really within your sphere of interest. Take me, for example. My true passion is for investigative journalism that goes to the very heart of the matter but until my talent for cutting socio-political commentary is recognised, I'm stuck doing frivolous TV columns.
A build-up of unspent creative inspiration could explain Doctors' continual edging away from anything to do with a medical practice. It may well reach the point that, while saving a group of schoolchildren from a mineshaft, the heroine is a woman who once lived two doors down from a doctor. Often, I find I'm only reminded of the programme's main focus on seeing the opening credits which consist solely of the words 'DOCTORS DOCTORS DOCTORS' flying madly across the screen.

On initial inspection, Doctors may appear normal but, as anyone who's ever watched it knows, it is the least realistic depiction of NHS general practitioners ever shown. Anywhere. In the real world your GP, being pushed for time, will hurriedly respond to your throat infection by printing off a prescription for Calpol and shoving you out the door. In the world of Doctors, your GP will read your throat infection as signs you're being mentally abused at home by your bed-ridden elderly mother. Not only will they give you penicillin, they will do a home visit! (I last witnessed a home visit in 1991 when the family had chicken pox and GPs a stronger work ethic).
They will then arrange counselling for you and your mother.

If, in the real world, you require an emergency appointment the misanthropic receptionist will still tell you to come back in Open Access hour. In the world of Doctors they will say this at first but, upon seeing your pain, soften and immediately find a doctor willing to treat you.

Consider those who constitute the majority of viewers in this daytime slot - the elderly, the bed-ridden and people who are in hospital and can't find a nurse to change neither channel nor bedpan - and a second, alternative explanation for the parallel world of this BBC soap is in evidence. This rose-tinted show reflects the NHS in an ideal world, so much so that in my more paranoid moments I've decided it's probably commissioned by them as an ongoing PR exercise. To those who say TV has no duty to mirror the tedious realities of real life, I'd like to remind them of the sadly-missed No Angels, which conveyed the NHS at its chaotic, blundering best. Coincidentally, it was also an infinitely better show.

UPDATE: I naively thought I had neatly summarised all that is wrong with Doctors but no; this man - who is very possibly crazier than those folk who take pics of rabbits with cakes on their heads - has went further than I ever could: http://www.crossrhythms.co.uk/articles/life/Something_Rotten_In_SoapLand/31261/p1/